Web Applications

My husband is a musician. He recently decided to brush up on his sight-reading, but was having a hard time finding pieces he’d never seen to practice on. He off-handedly mentioned to me that it would be great if there were a website that would just keep feeding him new, random pieces to sight-read.

“If only there was a website that…” The words that launched 1,000 ships! Needless to say, DLE was on the job and only a few months later we launched New Piece, Please!

Attentive.ly was started by by a couple of Fission Strategy alums to help organizations broaden their focus from email campaigns to social media services like Twitter and Facebook. They brought me on to revamp the interface for both the dashboard experience and the public facing marketing site.

Rather than begin with static wireframes, we went immediately into a rapid prototyping phase using the Foundation framework. For design, we leveraged a couple of Theme Forest themes, which got us quickly into front-end development.

At long last, I am very excited to announce the launch of the Sun Boxes Mobile App in both the iOS (iTunes) store and the Android store! You may recall from an earlier post that I built the Sun Boxes website last year. Sun Boxes is a sound installation by Craig Colorusso that uses solar power to play a series of guitar drone notes out of single speakers. Sounds mundane, perhaps, but it is one of the most humbly powerful pieces of art I’ve seen recently. I feel lucky to be a part of its momentum!

Our aim with the mobile app was not only to give users an easy way to interact with the piece by themselves, but also to encourage them to stage their own installation of the piece by turning their and their friend’s devices into individual Sun Boxes.

For this project, I was user experience designer, graphic designer, as well as front-end developer. Back-end development was handled expertly by my long-time collaborator and all around kind person, Mark Henderson. He created an API for the project, so you can expect more interfaces to join the fray soon.

My pal Mark and I launched Some Demands on October 15, 2011, 28 days after the first gathering in Zucotti Park (and three days after having the idea for the site!). While public support of #occupy was rising, so were criticisms that the movement had no clear goals.

We started Some Actions on November 4, 2011, as Occupy Oakland called for and carried out a general strike. Growing numbers of people were asking what they could do to get involved beyond occupying public spaces.

Together, these two sites are known as Some Sites, and they aim to provide an open space for suggesting and voting on what needs to change and how to change it.

Over the spring and summer, I had the opportunity to work with Local Projects on the companion website to the 9/11 Memorial in New York City. The memorial doesn’t open until 9/11/11, but you can already start exploring the names on the memorial wall now at the website:

For this project, I created the interface and client-side interactions for the CMS used to maintain the memorial names database. This involved everything from concepting intuitive layouts and interactions within an existing design framework, to handing the data off to the server via JSON.

I also pitched in on the rest of the guide’s front-end development, in particular scripting the interactions for scrolling through the names on the wall.

It’s rare that a project gives me the chance to do new things (build a CMS from scratch) while contributing to a meaningful cause (remembering 9/11). It was great to have such an opportunity in this site.

If you’ve worked in a corporate office before, you’ve likely come across someone who continues to be employed there despite seeming to do no work at all.

One former coworker of mine seemed to have an endless supply of one-liners that masterfully deflected work while leaving his facade of competence untarnished. Over time, I began to associate him with the Melville short story Bartleby the Scrivener in my mind. I also started to keep a list of his work-defying quips.

After a while, I felt strongly that ALL workers EVERYWHERE should have access to this magical power, and thus the idea of the Bartleby the 8 Ball Android app was born: A device, much like the Magic 8 Ball, that produces a suitable retort whenever someone comes at you with unpleasant work to do.

Tweue is a Twitter-based web app that allows users to queue their tweets not by scheduling them at precise times, but by choosing the interval of time between them. Perhaps a user only signs into Twitter once a day, but doesn’t want to bombard their followers all at once. Tweue allows them to spread their tweets evenly over the course of the day.